Boris Nikitin and his wife Elena are striking parents and amazing teachers, founders of new early childhood development method, creator of different developing toys and exercises. They dreamed about their own school but they had no possibility to open it because ot the peculiarities of Sovet system. Instead they created amazing family – outstanding example for parents of all the world how to make the children healthy and happy.

It’s hard to underestimate his role in the history of Russian pedagogics. He was the same for Russia, like Maria Montessori for Italy, Glenn Doman for USA, Masaru Ibuka for Japan. Perhaps he isn’t so famous in USA but I’m sure that it would be interesting to know about him for parents who do care about their children development.

The Nikitin’s family is well-known family in Russia and in all territory of former Soviet Union. By the example of their own family they showed how to help a child to become independent creative and harmonious developed person. Surely Boris and Elena Nikitiny were outstanding parents and teachers.

The first they were spoken about at 50th of XX century. In the small village Bolshevo people were shocked by their seven healthy talented and well developed children, who can walk on the snow with bare feet and do astounding gymnastic exercises. Till the 3 years children were able to read and solve simple mathematical problems. Everyone had a great desire to test children to know for sure of all rumours are true. But the school teachers held children up as an example for other students and all doctors said children were asolutely healthy.

The main principles of the early childhood development by Nikitin.

1. There are two extremes harmful for children development. First is too much attention, when parents don’t give enough time and space for being alone. Too much care, too many games are played, all day long the child is entertained and get use for the role of spectator.
The second is neglect. Communication with the child is only when he need to be fed up or washed, time go to bed or something else. This attitude cause emotional starvation and finally to the mental backwardness.

2. Freedom of choice. Children should choose what they like to do and how long to be busy with the activity. Children are never pressed to do something because the parents want it. Nikitin was against any artificial routine. Parents don’t choose but help to solve some difficult life problems for children. Parents advance the children and at the same time give them a push to development giving rich environment to explore and talking over everything around.

3. Attentive attitude of the parents. Children shouldn’t be left to themselves. Parents take part in all the activities.

4. The aim is not to teach children something earlier than other parents but to give all the objects kids are interested in to stimulate their further development.

Related Posts

• Development while painting for toddler
• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”
• Physics for Toddler: Crystals of Salt
• Sesil Lupan’s early child development method is very close to me
• Preschool Toddler

What is development while painting for toddler?
Painting for toddler isn’t the same that we mean speaking about painting.
When we (adults) think of painting we think about some image and embodiment it on the paper by the help of brush and colors.


We should remember that toddlers see the world in different way. I would say that they don’t see everything completely different, they just see it at the other angle.

Painting for toddlers is like experiment and rather a process than a result. They never know how the picture is looking that they are going to paint. They are playing with colors, explore the shades, color themselves and all they can reach around. Paints for them are like alive creatures that can move and speak, retelling awesome and fantastic stories. And if you want to interfere in and say with the expert look “Bears are never green”, you’ll spoil magic moment.

The development while painting is very essencial part of the early child development, because it is not the same as playing with toys. When playing toys a toddler uses already made toys. He is consumer.
But when playing with the paints a child learns how to create something. And this is more important in all developmental methods.

Some sceptic may say that their toddlers (especially at the age of 12-24 month) don’t paint at all but just get dirty with paints. In some points this is true. But it’s easier to say that something doesn’t true than to try to understand. I do believe that even in this early age them had a lot of emotions and impressions that they express playing with colors. Just don’t be afraid to believe.

One of our games with colors.

Red meets Yellow and say:
– Hello!
– Hello!
-Who are you?
- I’m Yellow. What is your name
– I’m Red. Let’s play and dance together!
– Oh, it would be really nice to play and dance together.
– What is your favorite song?
– My favorite song is (say your toddler’s favorite song)
- Oh, great! Let’s dance!
(And Red and Yellow starts to mix and turn into the Orange)
– We are friends and we are Orange!

The story is very simple and you can change it the way you like.

Related Posts

• Three Years Old. Looks like we’ll have some rest. Maybe…
• Early Childhood Development by Nikitin
• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”
• Physics for Toddler: Crystals of Salt
• Cookies help toddler to review letters

I don’t know if this game has other name but we call it “islands”. For this simple toddler game you need to make a lot of islands. Usually we take pillows or big puzzles. Like on the picture.

Your task is to cross the room walking or jumping only on islands.

Say to your toddler that everywhere is water and if he steps into water he’ll wet the feet.
Though the game is very simple from the first view it’s interesting and very developing because it develops imagination and vestibular apparatus. Besides it’s fun to do something together.

Related Posts

• Toddler Craft And Art Project With The Leaves
• Physics for Toddler: Crystals of Salt
• Cookies help toddler to review letters
• Wax plasticine food set – you’ll never be hungry!
• December Fine Motor Skill Activity For Toddler

How to help toddler to review the letters without making review boring? Just pretend you don’t want toddler to show you some knowledge. Toddlers like to do everything on the contrary. They will do everything you don’t want them to do and will say “no” to everything you want them to do.

All letters are learned, the first words are read, but when reading became boring let’s put books away and have fun eating sweet gingerbread cookies with favorite letters.

Just ask what letter he or she would like to eat:)

Even food ideas for toddler can make us creative.

Related Posts

• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”
• Wax plasticine food set – you’ll never be hungry!
• December Fine Motor Skill Activity For Toddler
• Toddler Craft And Art Project With The Leaves
• Autumn Art Project For Toddler and Preschooler

Here in Ukraine we buy Christmas tree before New Year because we celebrate Christmas on 7th of January.

But what should little toddler do when it’s so long till New Year but Christmas tree is wanted so much?

Of course decorate some other tree (or plant), for example, Aloe.

You can sing your favorite Christmas songs with toddler while decorating Aloe:)

Related Posts

• Making Decorations For Christmas Tree With Toddler
• Development while painting for toddler
• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”
• Cookies help toddler to review letters
• Don’t buy a furniture – buy lego

I decided that we don’t need new furniture for our daughter and for ourselves. We’ll use our lego sets to build some new design masterpieces and make our home more creative.

Some days ago we built a nice chair for Sophie.

By the way, this furniture is a very nice place to sit and think about life.

Now I’m thinking about some furniture for kitchen. Just need to buy some more sets of lego to be ready to start building our new kitchen.

Related Posts

• Wax plasticine food set – you’ll never be hungry!
• Making Decorations For Christmas Tree With Toddler
• Learning Seasons With Dolls
• How To Make a Toy-Rabbit in 3 Minutes
• Eco Friendly Toddler Doll

If you wondering what new activity or art project ideas for your toddler to entertain while the weather is bad you can try in December with toddler I hope this post can help you.
It’s very simple but at the same time positive activity for some reasons.
It’s very cheap.
It’s easy even for 18 month old toddlers.
It’s develop imagination and train fine motor skills.
It’s funny.

You can do a doggy.

You can do a car.

You can do a pig’s house and your child can pretend to be a wolf and blow it away

You can do a robot and blow away it too.

You can build even house for yourself

All that masterpieces we did listening to my daughter’s favorite Micky Mouse Christmas songs. I can’t imagine how did I live without Micky Mouse:) Is it t
he same with you?

Related Posts

• Wax plasticine food set – you’ll never be hungry!
• Toddlers Enjoy Cutting
• Toddler Craft And Art Project With The Leaves
• Autumn Art Project For Toddler and Preschooler
• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”

I know that things we don’t allow to touch our children are the most interesting.
Things we can’t afford also like a magnets for us – adults. It’s our nature.

If you don’t allow to touch a knife your toddler will dream about possibility to take it secretly. But if you allow to play with it (in your presence) knife will become a very usual thing and will be forgotten very soon.

For this purpose cutting banana was really good activity besides it’s good training for little hands.

Besides it’s good idea for making food for toddler together.

• December Fine Motor Skill Activity For Toddler
• Wax plasticine food set – you’ll never be hungry!
• Making Decorations For Christmas Tree With Toddler
• Toddler Craft And Art Project With The Leaves
• Autumn Art Project For Toddler and Preschooler

This is our new masterpiece made with leaves and paints. Autumn craft and art for toddler with leaves is go on. We use some of our autumn art projects from leaves and decided to color them.

I don’t know what you think about it but both of us were happy:)

P.S. In case you haven’t made up your mind about good present for your toddler look up this book. I think it’s great.

Related Posts

• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”
• December Fine Motor Skill Activity For Toddler
• Autumn Art Project For Toddler and Preschooler
• Autumn Activities for Toddlers
• Cookies help toddler to review letters

Winter for toddlers starts with stories we tell them about winter. This Christmas story for toddler with activities is about Christmas tree and while you’ll be telling the story your toddler can help you to color and decorate a Christmas tree for your story.

Christmas tree is one of the most favorite symbols of winter and Christmas. It’s so beautiful and trim. We find presents under our Christmas tree. How can we be indifferent to it after all?

The story is based on the Andersen’s fairy tale about fir tree. I make is shorter and easier to be not too difficult and long to listen for toddlers. The Andersen’s fairy tale has sad end (to my mind) so I decided to skip it. When my daughter will be older I’ll read the fool story but for present moment I prefer stories with happy end.

So in order to be prepared to tell the story you need to make two fir trees: little and big.

As you see it’s very easy for everyone. If your toddler like to color you can ask to color the fir trees.

For scenery we used a picture of wood from our paper theatre.

Once apon a time there was a little fir tree. The little fir tree had one eager desire. It wanted to become grown up.

Every day little fir tree was grumbling at its small stature. But day after day it was growing and growing and one day little fir tree discored that it was not so small. Now it was almost grown up.

One day Micky Mouse and Minnie mouse came to the forest to find suitable fir tree for Christmas.
(My daughter’s favorite character is Micky Mouse, so we use his here. But you may use a favorite toy of your child)

A fir tree was very happy that Micky Mouse decided to choose it and took home. Fir tree thought it was very important mission to be a Christmas tree.

Micky and Minnie decorated their beautiful Christmas tree. (For decoration cut different shapes from paper of different colors. Put some glue and give them to your toddler to decorate the tree. While decorating you can review the colors and shapes.)

Christmas tree is ready.

Micky and Minnie were very happy to have so pretty Christmas tree and fir tree was very happy to be so dainty. it was so proud of itself that even didn’t look at people in the room. What a solemn look it had when children found a lot of presents under the Christmas tree!

But when the Christmas gone Christmas tree started to miss the forest and it was very sorry that it wanted to grow up so quickly. Christmas tree thought that it had spent too little time enjoying its age.

P.S. In case you haven’t made up your mind about good present for your toddler look up this book. I think it’s great.

Related Posts

• Fun And Simple Christmas Songs For Singing For Toddlers
• Xmas Songs For Children Who Love Micky Mouse
• Our favorite easy toddler game “Islands”
• Cookies help toddler to review letters
• When it’s so long to wait for Christmas tree…